


The Dissection of Barnes' Monster

by sleepy_santiago



Series: Ecology of the Enchanted Forest [1]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Alternate Universe - Royalty, Anachronisms, Dark Romance, Frankenstein's Monster Abed Nadir, Fucked Up Science, Getting Together, M/M, Mad Scientist Troy Barnes, Magic, Mild Gore, Prince Abed Nadir, Sleeping Beauty Abed Nadir, Sleeping Beauty Elements, Violence, cheesy bad science fiction, handwavey historical era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28709256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepy_santiago/pseuds/sleepy_santiago
Summary: “Are you angry with me?”The monster blinked at Troy. The left half of his face had collapsed thanks to the nerve damage wrought by the electric shocks. His left eye, bright blue and puffy, stayed closed after the blink.“No. I’m not,” the monster said at last.“Do you regret that I did this to you?”Abed looked down at his hands and the decaying fingers that didn’t belong to him. “No. I don’t.”
Relationships: Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Series: Ecology of the Enchanted Forest [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2104506
Comments: 17
Kudos: 30





	The Dissection of Barnes' Monster

**Author's Note:**

> don't ask me how but I somehow got it in my head to write a frankenstein/sleeping beauty retelling mashup for trobed. throw in mad scientist troy on a steampunk motorcycle and prince/monster Abed and there you have it. 
> 
> i had planned for this to be a oneshot and it got away from me and now I think it's gonna be a multichap (or at least a couple-chap) ordeal which is why we're here now! please don't mind me i'm crazy <3
> 
> chapter warning: due to the nature of the Sleeping Curse, people (including Troy) kiss Abed while he's unconscious in an attempt to wake him.

“They called me a freak of nature. No, a freak of...science.”

“I know.”

“They say I’m a monster.”

“Are you angry with me?”

The monster blinked at Troy. The left half of his face had collapsed thanks to the nerve damage wrought by the electric shocks. His left eye, bright blue and puffy, stayed closed after the blink.

“No. I’m not,” the monster said at last.

“Do you regret that I did this to you?”

Abed looked down at his hands and the decaying fingers that didn’t belong to him. “No. I don’t.”

~

Troy had already ridden for five days and nights when word of the curse first reached him. 

He didn’t ride a horse. Horses, though sweet, paled in comparison to the velocity of Troy’s steel steed, a two-wheeled metal contraption that ran on oil, heat, and not an ounce of magic.

Troy planted his feet on either side of the vehicle and leaned toward the two young women on the side of the road, who shrank back. 

“A curse, you said?” Troy asked.

One of the women, a blonde of about eighteen, nudged her friend’s arm and tried to scurry back.

Troy held up a leather-gloved hand. “I mean no harm. It’s only information I seek.” He reached around into the bag tied around his waist and fished out two gold coins. He waggled them at the women.

They tiptoed forward, the hems of their blue and purple skirts rasping against the dirt road. The blonde extended her hand and plucked the coins from Troy’s hand. Her gloves were white and silky. 

“Tell him, Aurelia,” she murmured to her red-haired friend.

“‘Twas a curse that felled the prince,” the redhead said. “A curse of the variety that can only be broken by True Love’s Kiss.”

Both women tittered. The leather of Troy’s glove squeaked against the handle as he tightened his grip on it. 

“That’s the latest news? You’re sure?” Troy pressed.

Aurelia nodded. “They found out it was a sleeping curse a few days ago.”

“And I suppose you’re on your way to break it,” Troy said with an icy grin.

They glanced at each other. Aurelia shook her head at the blonde, almost imperceptibly. 

Troy sighed. “No matter. Thank you for your time.” 

He tipped an imaginary hat to the ladies and revved the growling engine of his vehicle. One of the women screamed when he shot forward onto the road with a roar. Heat flared against his clothed calf — he could imagine the flame spitting from the exhaust pipe behind him.

He grinned and sped on.

~

Troy remembered very few things about Prince Abed Nadir of Greendalia. He remembered that Abed was the only student in his Physics and Alchemy classes who could keep up with Troy — although Abed was discouraged from pursuing those paths. He had a kingdom to inherit, after all, along with all the bureaucracy and diplomacy and...geography, or whatever, that accompanied the task.

Troy also remembered his eyes, those gentle eyes with depths that Troy wanted to spend ages exploring.

But most of what Troy knew about Abed now, ten years later, he wheedled out of gossipers in taverns and frightened ladies by the road. A rumour here and a story there painted Troy a picture of Abed’s beauty and his good deeds and his valiant heart.

That was how Troy first learned of Abed falling ill — while he nursed a mug of ale at the inn where he’d stopped for the night.

“Is he really? Just — gone? Dead?” the girl behind the bar had whispered.

“Not dead,” corrected the good-natured man sitting at the bar. “Unconscious. He won’t wake up, no matter what they try, but his heart beats on, thank the stars.”

Troy sidled closer to the fair-haired man. “I’m Troy.”

“Rich, at your service.”

“Forgive me for the intrusion, Rich, but I must ask — who are you talking about?” Troy held his breath.

“Oh, the Prince of Greendalia, of course. His Highness, Abed Nadir. Haven’t you heard?”

Troy’s fingers stiffened around his tankard. 

It turned out that Rich had served as a court physician for the royal family for some time. He relayed all that he knew to Troy — how Abed had gone to bed the night before his twenty-fifth birthday and how he hadn’t woken up the next morning and how the King and Queen had summoned every physician, sorcerer, and charlatan in Greendalia to their court. 

Troy had paid for his drink, returned the room key he’d obtained earlier, and started on the road to Greendale Castle by the time midnight struck.

~

The queue wound through the castle’s stone corridors, stretched around the courtyard, and spilled across the drawbridge. It trailed off in the outskirts of the city. Women in dresses sewn from silk, linen, and muslin stood fanning themselves in the sun; the few men that interspersed the line tilted their hats down to shield their faces from the heat.

A guard in blue and white livery halted Troy at the entrance to the castle. “The line begins in the city, sir.”

Troy shoved forward. The guard pushed the tip of his rifle against Troy’s chest.

“I just need to see him,” Troy growled.

“Then you’ll wait in line like the rest of us,” a woman in the line shouted. A chorus of disgruntled agreement rose around her. 

Every one of these sweaty, frowning ingrates waited for the chance to bend over Abed’s prone form and put their lips on him. None of them knew Abed’s eyes.

Troy hands curled into fists by his sides.

~

“My friend Lisa says he has very soft lips,” Shirley remarked.

Troy groaned and massaged his temples. “I don’t want to hear about the line-up of lovestruck opportunists taking turns kissing my childhood friend.”

“Now, Troy, they’re only trying to help.”

“As am I.”

“I know.” Shirley paused to smile at Troy. “And I’m trying to help you.”

Troy blew out a breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m on edge.”

“It’s alright, dear.” 

Shirley Bennett, one of the most prolific clerics at the city library, had aided Troy more times than he could remember in his twenty-seven years, from cobbling late-night essays about poetry to retrieving less-than-legal books on science and cosmology that had formed the basis for Troy’s engineering prowess.

“How many people have tried, did you say?” Troy asked. He peered out of the second-story window at the line that just kept extending — it now cut off near the town center.

“About four hundred. It’s been three days,” Shirley sighed. “There’s still time for True Love’s Kiss to work, Troy.”

“You can’t just — you can’t just rely on magic like this.” Troy’s nail scraped over the wood grain of the table he sat in front of, again and again. “You can’t.”

He didn’t need to turn to feel the pitying gaze Shirley cast at him.

“Well,” Shirley finally said, “out of everyone, I trust you to find a non-magical solution to this.”

“I will.” Troy’s eyes burned when he looked at Shirley. “By God or by the devil, I will wake him, Shirley.”

“I trust you,” Shirley repeated.

Troy nodded his thanks. “First, I’ll need access to the information the court physician will have about his condition.”

Shirley clamped her hands over her ears but smiled. “This is as far as you should go with telling me your plans, dear. As a cleric of the royal library, I still have a duty to serve my King and Queen.”

~

Slipping into the castle at night, once the crowds of disappointed would-be suitors had dispersed, proved easy for Troy. Once he landed, cat-like, on the stone floor, he slipped the gun-shaped device he’d used to cut through the window back into his bag.

“See, who needs magic anyway?” Troy muttered under his breath.

He didn’t wander for long before he stumbled upon the room where Abed lay. 

A guard sat by the door, nodding off. Troy pulled out the syringe he’d prepared and peered around the corner of the corridor. He slunk up to the guard’s chair and grabbed his stubbled jaw. Before the guard could shout, Troy sank the needle and the yellow-tinged liquid it contained into his neck. 

The guard slumped against Troy and slid to the floor.

Troy stepped over him and into the room.

A transparent glass coffin encased the prince’s body, which lay on a silken white pallet. Someone had dressed him in a cornflower-blue tunic and trousers, both embellished with ivory buttons and golden thread. His slender hands rested on his stomach.

Troy lifted the lid of the coffin and placed his hand over Abed’s heart. The slow — alarmingly slow — but steady thump of his heart pulsed against Troy’s palm.

Troy’s own heart pounded as he cupped Abed’s face in his other hand. Abed’s skin was cold, but he looked even more beautiful than Troy remembered, with the jut of his cheekbones, the curl of hair that fell perfectly over his now-ashen forehead, and the long lashes that fanned over his cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” Troy whispered into Abed’s ear, stirring the hair around it. “I have to try. Just in case.”

He lowered his face over Abed’s. His eyes slid shut as his lips touched Abed’s. He pulled back and opened his eyes.

 _Thud. Thud. Thud_. Abed’s heartbeat maintained its moderato against Troy’s hand. Not even his eyelashes stirred.

Troy squeezed his eyes closed against the tears that prickled at them. 

~

Under the light of the lantern Shirley lit for him in the back of the library, Troy pored over the parchment onto which he’d copied everything the physician had written about Abed’s condition. 

“Find anything good?” Shirley asked, peeking over his shoulder.

Troy hummed. He had nothing. The petal-soft press of Abed’s lips still tickled his own. He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. 

Shirley squeezed his shoulder.

~

“I heard a girl tell a story once,” Troy said, “about how the prince rode to a village terrorized by a werewolf after the king and queen refused to send men to help them.”

“Ah,” said Shirley, still inspecting the spines of the books tightly packed onto the shelves. “Shadowfen.”

“Is the story true?”

“That depends. What story did you hear?”

Troy sipped from the cup of wine cradled in his hands. “I heard that the werewolf had haunted Shadowfen for five months, picking off villagers every full moon — the baker, the blacksmith, a mother of four young children, two teenagers. I heard that the king considered the village already lost. Not worth the men he’d lose if he sent any to face the wolf. I heard that the prince mounted his horse at midnight and rode for two days and nights without stopping. I heard that the night he arrived, the werewolf had a girl in his clutches — a young woman whose toes dangled above the ground as the monster, taller than the house she lived in, held her up by the scruff. And I heard that the prince charged at the werewolf without hesitating — with nothing but his sword and shield to fend against it. At least, that’s what the young woman claimed, for she was the one the prince rescued.”

“For one, Prince Abed brought three of his most trusted guards with him,” Shirley hummed. “For another, the battle was much messier than the girl made it seem. It’s true that he charged at the monster by himself. He shouted for the knights to stay back. But the wolf’s claws caught him in the chest and dragged through skin and sinew before he was thrown against the wall of a nearby barn. It took an injured prince and three exhausted knights with broken rifles to save the girl, and none of them left unscathed. The prince had to be slung over his horse and carried home. We didn’t think he would survive — he was bedridden for months afterward. Five months, actually, the same length of time that the werewolf had spent afflicting the village.”

Troy stayed quiet for a moment. “Who cast the curse on him? Why would someone want to do that?”

“Many reasons,” Shirley said. “Most notably, perhaps, spite.”

Troy gestured for Shirley to continue.

“We — I — believe the perpetrator to be a powerful witch named Mariah. She and the prince had known each other for years. Probably as long as you and he knew each other. She, well—” Shirley broke off.

“She what?” asked Troy, impatient.

“She and the prince, they…” Shirley chose her words with agonizing care. “They were romantically involved for some time.”

Troy’s chest tightened.

“It didn’t end well. From what I could glean, Prince Abed told Mariah that he had only been with her because it was expected of him — you know, she was a beautiful woman who was seen interacting with him quite regularly, thanks to their friendship. They made a good-looking couple. A storybook couple. After that, Mariah told him that he was handsome, but that his strangeness and callousness made him unlovable. That no one would ever love him again, after he rejected her.”

“So…” Troy swallowed. “So you think this curse was her way of proving her point.”

Shirley lowered herself into the seat across from Troy. Her wide eyes reflected the candle flickering on the table. “Did you try it when you broke into the castle, Troy?”

Troy fixed his gaze downward. “Try what?”

“You know what.”

He bit his lip. “Yes.”

“And it didn’t work.”

“No,” Troy snapped. “Obviously not.”

Shirley sat back, but Troy could feel her eyes still boring into him. 

“Yes,” she said. “I think this curse was Mariah’s way of proving her point.”

“Does that mean that True Love’s Kiss won’t work? Ever?” Troy demanded. “If she wanted to prove him unlovable, that is.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Shirley sighed. “And I certainly won’t be the one to tell his parents that.”

“Well, then, where the fuck is this Mariah woman?” 

“Calm yourself.” Shirley turned her steely eyes on Troy.

“I’m sorry.” Troy slumped back and closed his eyes.

“It’s okay.” A warm hand folded around Troy’s. “Mariah left the kingdom years ago. It’s unlikely she’s back here — I suspect that this curse was laid before she took her leave, set to be triggered at midnight on the prince’s birthday.”

“If True Love’s Kiss doesn’t wake him, what then?” Troy’s voice shook, not with fright but with the vibrato of a musical instrument gathering in volume. 

“I’m not sure there’s anything else to be done. Anything else I or the physicians or sorcerers can do.”

“But there _is_ something to be done. There are ways, Shirley, new ways I’ve been studying and theorizing — ways to bestow health, to strengthen the heart, to…” Troy swallowed. “To bring back to life.”

“I didn’t say that there wasn’t anything else you could do. I’m just letting you know that there isn’t much else I can do.” Shirley looked at Troy. “But you would do well to tread carefully, Troy. You’ve always been brilliant — brilliant, but hotheaded. Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you should. You know why the practice of science is not welcomed with as much gusto as it once was. Without ethics, the sciences pave the way for corruption.”

“You could say the same thing about magic.”

“What happened to your parents was tragic. It doesn’t pardon you from moral responsibility. Even the most reckless practitioners of magic heed the warning that life and death are not to be meddled with.”

Troy’s jaw ticked. “It’s too late for my parents. But it isn’t too late for Abed.” 

He stood, kissed Shirley’s cheek, and strode out of the library.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on tumblr @[sleepy-santiago](sleepy-santiago.tumblr.com)!


End file.
